Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.
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Trust not the heart of that man for whom old clothes are not venerable.
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The deadliest sin were the consciousness of no sin.
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Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
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The civil authority, or that part of it which remained faithful to their trust and true to the ends of the covenant, did, in answer to their consciences, turn out a tyrant, in a way which the Christians in aftertimes will mention with honor, and all tyrants in the world look at with fear.
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To know, to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic art, of which the best logic's can but babble on the surface.
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History is philosophy teaching by experience.
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With respect to duels, indeed, I have my own ideas. Few things in this so surprising world strike me with more surprise. Two little visual spectra of men, hovering with insecure enough cohesion in the midst of the unfathomable, and to dissolve therein, at any rate, very soon, make pause at the distance of twelve paces asunder; whirl around, and simultaneously by the cunningest mechanism, explode one another into dissolution; and, offhand, become air, and non-extant--the little spitfires!
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Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man.
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And yet without labour there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable.
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Wise man was he who counselled that speculation should have free course, and look fearlessly towards all the thirty-two points of the compass, whithersoever and howsoever it listed.
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Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.
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The goal of yesterday will be our starting-point to-morrow.
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It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
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Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.
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A thinking man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every time such an one announces himself, I doubt not there runs a shudder through the nether empire; and new emissaries are trained with new tactics, to, if possible, entrap and hoodwink and handcuff him.
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Poverty, we may say, surrounds a man with ready-made barriers, which if they do mournfully gall and hamper, do at least prescribe for him, and force on him, a sort of course and goal; a safe and beaten, though a circuitous, course. A great part of his guidance is secure against fatal error, is withdrawn from his control. The rich, again, has his whole life to guide, without goal or barrier, save of his own choosing, and, tempted, is too likely to guide it ill.
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Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.
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Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
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Affectation is the product of falsehood.
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Midas-eared Mammonism, double-barrelled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries, are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this His universe to go.
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All comes out even at the end of the day.
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He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.
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No man at bottom means injustice; it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that he contends: an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in the wonderfulest way by natural dimness and selfishness; getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest, till at length it become all but irrecognis-able.